Back Home for Christmas (Cont.)
Screen 2 of 4Then I began to reflect at length on how active and happy my life had been, recalling many exciting things I had experienced. We had been poor -- our family of three -- but my mother had stretched her meager salary as a teacher to include wherever possible opportunities for my brother and me. There were piano and dancing lessons when I was very young. Sunday school followed by simple picnics, summer camps, cultural events, limited travel to see interesting places and famous people, swimming, tennis, basketball, delivering newspapers, chopping wood for our heating stove at home, carrying water and digging ditches on construction jobs during the summer and vacation periods, dating girls, going to parties and dances, active participation in the Demolay organization, writing themes, short stories, and book reports under marvelous teachers like Belle Potter at Bowling Green High School, participating in all sorts of plays and musical comedies, playing and singing in dance bands, being a cheerleader in college, and teaching for a year in a rural school in Virginia.
As I recalled all these and many more things I had done in my twenty-two years (I had just celebrated my twenty-second birthday earlier that fall in September), I kept on coming back to teaching. All the other activities had left me with vivid memor1es -- some bad, most of them quite pleasant -- but the inner glow of deep satisfaction I remembered about teaching at Oaks School in Virginia two years before began to override everything I had recollected. And when about this time in my meditation, two children -- a boy about nine and a girl, perhaps twelve -- ran around my park bench laughing as they chased each other, I remembered Otis Driggs and his sister, Marjorie, both of whom I had taught at Oaks School. They were two of my favorites, but I tried not to let them or others know this.
That flashback then triggered my memory of other pupils and specific events connected with that school -- itself located at a remote crossroad under a huge oak tree, such as the one now above me. I remembered the mischievous but very intelligent Brankley brothers who early in the year had thrown a dead skunk in the school's only well, "just for the hell of it," but who turned out to be good students and ardent supporters of the school and me. Then another pupil, Ralph, came to mind. Ralph, by far the biggest boy in school, not excluding his teacher, challenged me to a fight on the first day, but we worked out our differences -- without a fight -- and he went on later to earn a law degree at the University of North Carolina.
Then much more about that year of teaching came back to me -- things I had almost forgotten, some of the incidents hilarious, others rather sad, but all of them rewarding to me. Particularly had I taken great pride in my part in helping those pupils -- ages nine to fifteen -- to grow and develop, both personally and academically.
"That's it," I said aloud, as I got up from the park bench. "Teaching is what I want to do again." There was then no doubt about it. Of course, I had not forgotten -- nor will I ever forget -- the great pleasure I had gotten along the way from the publicity, recognition, and acclamation received frequently for my performances on stage -- both amateur and professional. All that attention had fed my ego. I could still hear the thunderous applause which had came from across the footlights, and I realized that consciously or not I had always wanted more. Even then, on the Central Park bench, I was for a while torn between seeking more of that kind of happiness in the theatre and going back to teaching. But in the final analysis -- for me -- teaching won out over acting.
My private soliloquy was over. I knew now exactly what I wanted to do: go back into teaching. Of course, I did not know where I could get a position, at what level, or in what subject field, but I was sure those things would fall into place. Dr. Fosdick had mentioned something about that problem also, when he said, "and all these things shall be added unto you," as well as, "the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."
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